Malayalam – Island of Mysteries is a puzzle adventure, in which the player controls a character named Thomas Paine, a 34-year old fisherman, who has shipwrecked somewhere in the Eastern Indian Ocean. He drifts onto an unknown desert island named Malayalam, where the adventure takes place.

The initial goal for the player is to stay alive and secure sufficient living conditions to enable further progress in the game. This involves finding food, hunting, constructing tools, building shelters, sleeping, and other everyday activities on the island.

The second goal is about solving quests, which are often some sort of puzzle or riddle presented to the player in form of pergaments and bottle posts. In these, the player needs to seek solutions using objects or information he has discovered on the island. The ultimate goal is to solve all missions on the island, and find a way off.

The game awards Malayalam Points for each day survived and for each quest solved. Players can compete with each other in an online highscore table, which ranks every contender by the number of Malayalam Points earned.

- Shake palms, some of them drop bananas and coconuts = good source of food
- One axe head can be found in the south of the Kanauj region, which is north from the region where you start the game. Check out the green dots in the map.
- Try different fishing locations, e.g. salmons are much better fish than sardines and give more food

This game is great, played it for a while and took some time to get used to it. There are a few bugs that I hope can be corrected like i was unable to drink the water bottles and starved to death. But when i reset the game it was working ok. Still a great game, ill just have to save more often.

are you sure it was water bottles? sometimes i picked up a "water bottle" and it said i picked up a sardine.

i think the whole "trying no to die!" aspect of the game detracts a bit from actually playing it. i died from starvation in a matter of a single day. you wouldnt die that fast if you were really on an island. you can go upwards of 40 days without food, and upwards of a week without water. you starve too fast in the game.

its riddled with other tiny flaws as well. like chopping stuff. a lot of the time i would chop really slowly then bug out and start floating away. i had to right click twice to stop moving and start moving properly again.

cecil, there are many ways to get more food easier. For example, some fish can give you like +40 food per a fish etc. There is a Tips & Hints forum at http://www.mjkgames.com/smf/index.php?board=22.0 in case you are interested to check it out.

MJK, the food isnt the problem, as i said my food/water % thing was at 94% when i "starved". i cant find WATER fast enough. im at a point right now where its 34degrees celcius (i assume your water thing goes down faster when its hotter?), my water is at half, and im frantically trying to find as much water as possible but it goes down faster than i can find water and i die of "starvation".Comment edited by cecil on 11/11/2008

Yeah, the hot days can be difficult. Most of the regions have water, and it is unlimited in those areas, so you can always get new bottles. You can e.g. set "remarks" on the map about the locations where water appears so that you know where to search in the future. It always takes some wandering around to find new bottles though.

One thing that can be useful is to keep e.g. 5 full water bottles in your inventory to prevent sudden dehydration. Also shaking wells may give you water bottles. When it rains, there will be plenty of them available.

I'm trying to drink the water bottles, but they just keep dropping on the ground when i put them on my player, unlike food that give a health bonus, the water bottles don't seem like they are working correctly.

Actually, it seems that the water bottles in my inventory dont work, the ones on the ground do.Comment edited by Toasty on 11/11/2008

EDIT: yes, that's the case. Water bottles taken from inventory are not drinkable. I'll make a patch available for this still today, so that you can update your game with it.Comment edited by MJK on 11/11/2008

This game looks like it's going to be great! GOING TO! It doesn't feel finished yet!

I played the tutorial, and i found a whole bunch of bugs!

Sometimes you start to slide away in a random direction if you right klick too much.

When you set a tree on fire you walk "above" the fire.

You shake like hell if you walk in to something (known bug yeah, but you should be able to find a workaround)

and probably something more that i don't remember right now.

The whole concept feels great! And you seem to have spent much time on it! But when you spend that much time, can't you pend a tenth more of that time to double the playability of the game? Also, i didn't really like the "go to my forum" pop-up ad, and the writing in the grass. Takes away a lot of the feeling and makes the game feel like a trial version.

I'm looking forward to a stronger update, but right now I'm not going to play, or rate this game.

Good feedback, Attan. We have small patches coming every now and then and maybe at some stage those will address also some of those known bugs you mentioned.

What comes to the forum, it will be an essential part of playing the game. There will be loads of useful information for the players in the forum, so just like there is a manual or in-game help, there is also a forum. Good sources of help for the player. So, just to add one ad: visit www.mjkgames.com

Nevertheless, feel free to rate the game as it is now in your opinion. Even though you wouldn't enjoy playing it, there's no reason not to rate it.

I love the game, as you can probably tell. I also noticed the bug with the water bottles you pick up, but I've been getting by with using the well in the starting area a lot. I don't know if this is a bug, or if there's just a step I'm missing, but when I shoot down a seagull with the cannon, I can't interact with it. Can't eat it, pick it up, or use anything on it.

I loved the game Notrium, so I was really looking forward to this, and it hasn't dissapointed so far. Was Notrium an inspiration for Malayalam?

Thanks, WonderLlama. I haven't played or heard about Notrium before, but might as well check it out now.

About the seagulls, are you on a "Bird Hunt" minigame when you shoot them down? Because if you are, then you can't use them for anything (same with crabs in "Crab Arena" minigame). Using the cannon outside the minigame should give you edible birds.

This game still seems a bit too random for me. Just a second ago there were water bottles all over the screen, but now that I really need them I don't find a single one, and I can't find a strategy that helps me figure out how to retrieve it.

Everything feels more balanced in Stranded II, where water doesn't just pop up in form of bottles, but comes from water sources which you'd build shelters nearby, to use as an outpost to explore the rest of the island. I think I'd appreciate that more, if water is something you go to specific locations to get, while food is what you explore the island to get.

I'm sure it's a good game, but it isn't really that fun to me. I mean, sure it's deep- but I prefer a bit more action a bit sooner in games. Very well made though, I'll give you that- but it seems quite buggy and fiddly.

Nicklas, water bottles always appear in same locations, but you need to walk around a bit and wait for those to appear. So if you have seen a water bottle to appear somewhere, you can be sure that there will be more bottles around that place also in the future. Another way to get water is to shake wells.

Whoa, great game. The only thing is that it seems to be lacking polish. Also, the deaths are a bit annoying and I don't really like wandering half the island to look for an axe head, only to find that there's one close to where I started. It would be nice if the map was randomly generated, that would double the lastability of the game

I can't help but think that if this game had been released with out any hype, it would have been ignored or even hated by a lot of people. I'm saying that that would have been unfair, but I'm just stating that unless people are informed exactly what a game is trying to be, they won't respect it for what it is.

I didn't quite get this game, but it seems pretty well made. Reminds a lot of MDickie's games like someone said eariler, in that it has very much to do, so much in fact you'll fail because you don't knwo where to start